Axel
Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman’s Journey Through Afghanistan, is indeed a very long name for a book. However, Fariba Nawa does a fabulous job depicting the disturbing picture of present-day Afghanistan and taking the ( what are you trying to say? Reread the whole sentence)women’s role in it as the main role. Fariba(always use the whole name) Nawa is a journalist who was born in Herat, Afghanistan and by the age of nine she and her family escaped (Try: Migrated to the United States after the Soviet Invasion of 1979 where her family was forced to leave after an attack that hit too close for comfort) the Soviet war in their country after their lives were exposed to extreme danger. This was mainly when the mujahideen (a groups of loosely aligned Afghan positioners) attacked Nawa’s school, Lycee Mehri, (its seems irrelevant and out place) in July of 1982 killing dozens of students and almost killing her sister Faiza.
Nawa recalls that day as one that she and her mother went to take their weekly bath at the public bathhouse, a few miles from their neighborhood, while Faiza went to school. That day, a woman told her mother that her husband had heard that the mujahideen planned to attack Lycee Mehri because girls were being taught communist propaganda there. (Make it more terrorizing, talk about the bombing and how she saw her friends decapitated) Nawa remembers that the scene that day in the streets made a little bit of sense. The streets were empty with few cars and horse wagons when they headed back home. Once home, they heard a big explosion and went out of the house and ran to the school looking for Faiza. At the school’s gate there was an ambulance overflowed with injured students but miraculously her sister was fine with no Injuries.
In her book she mentions that the violence she witnessed at her school defined the path she had taken in her adult life.
“War can become an addiction for its victims because it provides them meaning at the